The friendly and allied Indians appreciated the results to be obtained from the sale of their captives to the whites, and not only sold them to the “coureurs de bois” and other traveling traders, but took them directly to the French settlement for sale, as is shown in the preceding paragraph. Apparently all the leading French settlements afforded a ready market for such slaves. Mobile furnishes a case in point. In November, 1706, a party of Ouacha arrived in the settlement bringing some Abnaki captives for sale.[220] In the same month, also, some Choctaw brought to the settlement Cahouita and Altamaha captives for the same purpose.[221] It was the Jesuit and French missionaries who first advocated the purchase of Indian captives by the traders, in order to prevent their being put to death. By putting them in a mild condition of servitude they hoped to place them in a position where they would be Christianized.[222] Both Tonti[223] and La Salle[224] advised such a course of action. The colonists favored the same action for a more commercial reason. The French of Kaskaskia, in 1708, were urging the allied Indians to war, and were on the spot to obtain captives to sell as slaves to the English.[225] De Vaudreuil, governor-general of Canada, throughout the first quarter of the eighteenth century was urging the Abnaki to wage war on the Illinois to obtain slaves for him.[226] An important factor in the French colonial trade was the “coureurs de bois.” These men, having cut loose from civilization, wandered at will among the Indians, trading for the various commodities which they could dispose of in the settlements of either the French or English colonies. One of these commodities was Indian slaves, obtained for the most part from the tribes who had captured them in war. Judging from the number of these white men of the woods, their unrestrained life, and the evidence given by the men of the time, it seems not unlikely that this feature of colonial trade produced a considerable portion of the Indian slaves used by the French.[227] If the “coureurs de bois” did not find a sufficient number of slaves among the tribes they visited, they not infrequently stirred up the tribes to war, so that they might obtain the captives for sale. On July 25, 1707, La Salle wrote from Fort Louis to the Minister of Marine that the “coureurs de bois” from Canada were thus stirring up the Indian tribes against each other, in order to obtain Indian slaves to sell in Louisiana.[228] The work of the “coureurs de bois” was, however, by no means limited to Louisiana, but extended over all the area claimed by the French. The desire of the English for Indian slaves afforded an opportunity for profit that could not be rejected. They always found a ready market for their Indian slaves with the English of the Carolina country. The control of the French officials over this wandering class was always slight, and since there was practically no export trade in Indians to be had in